Event Recap of the Spring 2015 Colorado Municipalities
Work Comp Series

Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to attend our second workers’ compensation series. This second series was a wonderful success, thanks in part to the City of Delta providing such a great venue as our host city. A hearty congratulations to the Town of Leadville for taking home the $100 gift card that was graciously donated by Fastenal. From this event we have been asked for one on one meetings and trainings with Return to Work, Fastenal and Virgin Plus (HRM). These individual training/meetings will be at your site with a specialized training (Pinnacol, Fastenal and Network coming to you) if you would like. A few of our municipalities would like all their department heads to be part of the training so please let me know if you are interested and I can work you into our schedule. Depending on your personalized needs we can whittle the training down to an hour or so.

Let’s keep up our momentum with our lack of losses. We have a goal of 40% improvement on our loss ratio, year to date we have 68% improvement but keep in mind we still have half a year to go and Oct, Nov and Dec to experience (especially in the high country). Let’s think about gearing up for those months.

I am so sorry I forgot to mention on Friday that two people from our group of municipalities took home a few safety awards from CIRSA. City of Rifle/Lisa Hamilton won the Safety Champion award for 2014 and the Town of Rangely/Lisa Piering won the Safety Champion as well. Congratulations to both of them!!!!!!

Last, let me leave you with what my partner Nick Vuolo said during the presentation that really hit home to many who attended. Those of you (and you know who you are) that did not make it I wanted to leave you with this:

Nick, proposed that communication in all aspects of workers compensation is the key to success. Communication with us as your agent, the carrier, the doctors before and after a claim as well as the injured worker before a claim, during the claim and yes even after the claim happens. The last idea of communicating with the injured worker after the claim is over or even while the claim is happening to get their feed back on how the claim is going and what if any questions they may have about the process is critical to making improvements.

How do you feel you were treated by the physicians?

How do you feel you were treated while filing the claim?

Did the claim seem to run smoothly for you?

Do you have any questions about the paperwork you are getting from the carrier and the doctor?

Do you understand the doctors recommendations or restrictions as it relates to your work?

Any recommendations to the carrier or us?

Having a conversation with your injured worker really helps in the worker relationship and how we can grow to be better at what we do. Just like doing an accident investigation for safety purposes we should investigate how our processes are working to see how we can make improvements for future claims.

Please send me any ideas for our next event that you would like us to present. Let me know your thoughts on this last event and how we could have made it better.